Everybody hates spam.  It clogs up your mailbox like a blocked drainpipe.  I have had my share of spam advertising russian brides, replica watches, penis enlargers, and lists of Doctors in the United States for sale.  Hear my story about some locally generated spam in New Zealand.

Up until now this spam has all originated mainly from China and the United States.  Even before New Zealand introduced the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act in 2007 my email box was generally free of locally generated spam.

I was surprised to receive in my email today an email from Printa NZ, a New Zealand based company offering various print options.  I did not sign up for this newsletter.  

The email included the following paragraphs:

Printa Ltd would like to ask for your permission to email you no more than once a month a special offer on one of our print, promotional or pen selections..

DO NOT CONTACT ME AGAIN:  Please go to the bottom of this page and click on unsubsribe and type in the email address that this email was sent to – You will be deleted immediately from our contact list and we would like to apologise for any inconvenience.

To clarify two very important points:

• An organisation can not send you an unsolicited email which asks permission to send you further communication

• An organisation must have your prior acceptance before sending email communications to you.  

Prior acceptance could be given by signing a document authorising the communication or by otherwise inferring consent.  For example, if you provide a business card to the organisation with your email address on it you may be providing interred consent to further emails being sent to you.  Both these situations show a prior connection between parties.

Further arrogance is shown in the email from Printa NZ in their attempt to require people to make use of an “OPT-OUT” facility to stop receiving further promotional material from them.  If you do not OPT-OUT of their email list it appears that Printa NZ thinks it is perfectly acceptable to continue barraging you with spam.  

IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO STAY ON OUR CONTACT LIST:  You need do nothing and a email will be sent out to you in a month or two letting you know our next special.

The OPT-OUT facility is a requirement under the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 and is intended as an option for subscribers that have already authorised the communication by opting in.

I am not a lawyer and this is not to be considered legal advise.

If you would like to report receiving spam from Printa NZ or any other New Zealand based organisation, you  can report the breach to the Department of Internal Affairs via their website.

Check out the response I received from Deb at Printa NZ after the break.

Hi Hayden

My sincere apologies – email was sent out in error – all your details have be permanently removed and you will not be contacted again – I am also in the process of taken the entire email system down.

We are only a small business and this was to be our first try at emailing unfortunately a wrong group was clicked and emailed in error.

Hoping this is acceptable 

Regards Deb

Printa

Some points of note regarding the response from Printa NZ below

• Where did they get my email address from?  I have never had any prior dealings with this company.  I suggest that their method for obtaining my email address in the first place is questionable.
   
• They state that they are a small company and this is their “first” try at emailing.  Printa appear to run a website design service under the brand “Digital Stream” which they link to from their main site.  Would you trust this company to build a website for you when they can’t even use email correctly?

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Tags: Printa NZ, Spam, Unsolicited Email

This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 11:50 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.